text: In 1554 the physician Andres Laguna published his Annotations on Dioscorides of Anazarbus printed by Guillaume Rouillé in Lyons. Laguna was the first to translate De Materia Medica into Castilian. His translation was made from one of the Latin editions of Jean Ruel. It was also based on classes Laguna took from Ruel as his pupil in Paris. Laguna points out some of his teacher's erroneous translations, and adds many commentaries, which make up more than half of the total work.
  Laguna explored many Mediterranean areas and obtained results concerning many new herbs; he also added these prescriptions and commentaries to the recipes and teachings of Pedanius' Dioscorides. He also includes some animal and mineral products but only those related to simple medicines, that is, animal and mineral products that are medicine or are parts of a medical compound. This was not an illustrated work. In 1555 he re-edited this work with woodcuts.
  It was reprinted twenty-two times by the end of the 18th century; Laguna wrote very well, with explanations and practical commentaries. He refers to anecdotes, adds commentaries on the plants, provides their synonyms in different languages, and explains their uses in the 16th century. These qualities and the number of woodcuts made this work very popular and appreciated in medicine far beyond the 16th century. He had problems with Mattioli for using some of his commentaries without mentioning him.
  Laguna had problems with the Inquisition, just like Michel de Villeneuve, for both were jewish-converso, a fact that could have made them limit their commentaries to avoid risks. Nevertheless, he was the physician of Charles V and the Pope Julius III, and that helped to establish his work as the last word in Materia Medica, and as the basis of Spanish botany.